With divine grace and unmatched drive, these elite athletes are ready to swim, kick, tumble, and sprint their way to the summer Olympic games.

ALEXANDRA RAISMAN | GYMNASTICSTo see her do a round-off one-and-a-half twist followed by a round-off back-handspring Arabian double front and then finish up with a punch layout that is pretty much impossible to do without a decade of training (and maybe even impossible with that) is enough to make even the most fit of us need a nap, which is why it is either perplexing or scary to hear Alexandra Raisman say that she is just getting it together. “I’m focused now, definitely,” says the eighteen-year-old Massachusetts native. “I absolutely need to show everyone that I’m powerful and strong and can be graceful and artistic, too.” It’s true that in her younger years (i.e., middle school) she was seen primarily as a powerhouse, but she has lately been working on grace, particularly during her floor routine. “Tumbling has always been my favorite,” she says. When she says “always,” she means since she was two, when her mom put her in a tumbling-for-tots program. Currently she juggles mind-numbingly exhaustive practices (rope climbing with weights is the easy part) with high school, thanks to online makeup work and support from her fellow seniors. “I’m so lucky to be a high-level athlete and have such great friends!” She is also lucky to see gold-medal balance-beam work as doable. “You have to forget that you are on something that’s four inches wide and four feet off the ground and just give it 100 percent,” she says. “That’s all you have to do.” That and be the best in the world.

CARMELITA JETER | TRACK & FIELDThough Carmelita Jeter is the fastest woman in the world, she was late to start as a runner. It was her high school basketball coach who suggested she switch from court to lane, a bit of a shock considering that she had grown up playing basketball. “Those were my best kid memories,” says the California-raised sprinter of the neighborhood games she and her brother Eugene, a pro basketball player, hosted every Saturday at their home.

Jeter caught on, and up, fast. She was a six-time all-American at Cal State, Dominguez Hills, but a series of hamstring injuries slowed her down, and in 2008, she failed to make the U.S. team, causing a moment of soul searching and retooling. A year later, that translated into a 10.64-second 100-meter run at the Shanghai Golden Grand Prix, in China—the fastest time ever after the late Florence Griffith Joyner.

At 32 years old, Jeter may have both her first and last chance at an Olympic gold, but she considers a spot on the team in itself a reward. “It means that one day I will have my name in the history books.”

HOPE SOLO | SOCCERHope Solo used to keep her work a secret. Not the soccer-playing part but her position. “You know, with goalie they would play the slow kid in school, and basically for over a decade I was embarrassed to say I was goalkeeper,” she says. Her secret is out. With her fresh-faced looks and supremely fit five-foot-nine frame, the 30-year-old has almost singlehandedly changed the perception of goalies. “I heard somebody say once that goalkeepers don’t win games, they save them,” she says. She proved this in college, where she was the University of Washington’s all-time leader in shutouts (eighteen) and saves (325), and then as the starting goalie for the U.S. Women’s Team. In the Beijing Olympics, Solo shut down Brazil for the U.S. to win 1–0 in extra time. Although she is known for her brazen style, for Solo, the path to victory is Zen-like composure. “The other day, I was about to face penalty kicks,” she says. “We came into the huddle, me and my teammates—I wound up crossing the field and just being alone, and I just got into that zone.” And made the saves.

**[#image: /photos/589200ae12a7b1df212c9bbf]||||||**SYDNEY LEROUX | SOCCERReporters often describe Sydney Leroux as “dangerous,” but that downplays what the U.S. Women’s Soccer team’s 22-year-old forward can do to an opponent. She once scored five goals in an Olympic-qualifying match, made a hat trick against Switzerland at the 2010 FIFA Women’s World Cup, and has a talent for raising her game in conditions that might slow other players down. “I absolutely love playing in the rain,” says Leroux, who grew up outside Vancouver, B.C., in a coastal area known for its precipitation (her mom is Canadian, her dad American). “It reminds me of home.” Her attacks are all in a day’s work. “I think my role right now is to be causing havoc,” says the scoring sensation with her trademark mischievous glee. Although she is among the youngest players on the squad, she sounds like a seasoned pro when she lays out her game strategy. “You get one really small chance,” she says about her knack for finding just the right moment to score. “When that chance happens, you feel it. You pounce on that. And it may happen in the eighty-ninth minute, but it will happen. That’s my favorite part of the game, finding these glitches and trying to make something of them.”

The high school swimming superstar credits her success, in part, to her six-foot-one frame. Lanvin bronze on-shoulder bathing suit. In this story: hair, Thom Priano for Garren New York; makeup, Alice Lane. Set design by Tom Criswell for Mary Howard Studio. Produced by Dawn Boller for Little Bear Productions.

MISSY FRANKLIN | SWIMMINGShould you see Missy Franklin a little bit behind in the pool this summer in one of what will likely be many races, don’t count her out. “I’m known to go absolutely crazy and pull all this energy out of nowhere,” explains Franklin, who holds the world record with her team in the 4-by-100-meter medley relay and won the individual gold in the 200-meter backstroke at the 2011 FINA World Championships. “I don’t really know where it comes from, but I always try in that last fifteen meters to give whatever I have left, and just push 110 percent until I hit the wall.” She is a monster, in other words, though you would never know it from her unassuming life as a low-key, seventeen-year-old Catholic high school kid who devoured The Hunger Games and loves to dance—ballet, jazz, anything. She ascribes her success to her height (six feet one), feet (size 13), and hands (big), as well as her mom, who gets the gold every time at the rigorous family board games they play in Centennial, Colorado. Her former-football-playing dad also taught her a thing or two about competition (“On everything, I will take him down!”) and nicknamed her Missy the Missile at age twelve. “I kind of did the whole ‘Dad, never say that again’ thing,” she says. “But of course, knowing my dad, it totally stuck.”

She is on track to be the female Michael Phelps this summer (or Ryan Lochte, depending on how things go in London), and if people ask her how it happened, she will recall her first Olympic trials, when she was thirteen and didn’t make the cut. The pool in Omaha looked like Times Square. “Before that, the biggest crowd I’d ever performed for was maybe 200 people,” she says. On the ride home with her folks, something clicked, and she really dug in for her coach. (The two first teamed up when she was a seven-year-old Starfish.) “I think we’re both surprised at how far we’ve come, especially together,” she says. Soon the world will be watching to see just how far they will go.